BUSTED: Big Ag's Big Myths About the Clean Water Protection Rule

One of my kids’ (and my) favorite TV shows is “Mythbusters.” It’s got a great combination of fact-based scrutiny of popularly held beliefs and a healthy dose of excellently infantile humor. Given how fun they make it look, I expected to really enjoy myself when I tried my own hand at it, albeit in the distinctly wonky world of clean water policy. Alas, my experience in myth-busting has been pretty dispiriting.

But we need to keep pushing back, because these myths are scaring people, especially farmers, about the rule. In reality, the proposal is a commonsense effort to restore protections under the Clean Water Act to critical streams, wetlands, and other waters that today are in legal limbo, and it actually needs to be stronger, not weaker.

Rather than acknowledging its over-the-top rhetoric when it has been exposed, the Farm Bureau has doubled down, suggesting that the rule would regulate virtually every drop of water in the United States, plus vast swaths of dry land to boot. In fact, following an EPA official’s blog post describing some of the myths about the proposal, the Farm Bureau last week put out a long-form version of its most misleading claims, as a point-counterpoint to the EPA blog.

So, I sat down at the computer again, and created a lengthy point-by-point rebuttal to the Farm Bureau’s rebuttal (does that make it a “threebuttal”?). You can read it in its entirety by clicking here: Analysis of AFBF response to EPA myth blog.pdf. I’d like to think that the Mythbusters would, after reading the various materials, declare the Farm Bureau’s many claims to be “BUSTED.”

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